A Little While

Haiti earthquake

My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.

Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. “I felt,” my Aunt Denise used to say, “as though I spent all three days pushing him out of my eyes.” She had a long scar above her right eyebrow, where she had jabbed her nails through her skin during the most painful moments. She never gave birth again.

Maxo often complained about his parents not celebrating his birthday. “Are you kidding me?” I’d say, taking his mother’s side. “Who would want to remember such an ordeal?” All jokes aside, it pained him more than it should have, even though few children in Bel Air, the impoverished and now shattered neighborhood where we grew up, ever had a birthday with balloons and cake.

When Maxo was a teen-ager, his favorite author was Jean Genet. He read and reread “Les Nègres.” These lines from the play now haunt me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If I ever return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”

Two days after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, on January 12, 2010, I was still telling my brothers that one night, as we were watching CNN, Maxo would pop up behind Anderson Cooper and take over his job.

Maxo was a hustler. He could get whatever he wanted, whether money or kind words, simply by saying, “You know I love you. I love you. I love you.” It always worked with our family members in New York, both when he occasionally showed up to visit and when he called from Haiti to ask them to fund his various projects.

The last time I heard from him was three days before the earthquake. He left a message on my voice mail. He was trying to raise money to rebuild a small school in the mountains of Léogâne, where our family originated. The time before that, someone in the neighborhood had died and money was needed for a coffin. With a voice that blended shouting and laughter, Maxo made each request sound as though it were an investment that the giver would be making in him or herself.

When my eighty-one-year-old Uncle Joseph, a minister, left Haiti, in 2004, after a gang threatened his life, Maxo, his son, was with him. They travelled together to Miami, hoping to be granted political asylum. Instead, they were detained by the Department of Homeland Security and separated while in custody. When Maxo was finally able to see his father, it was to translate for the medical staff, who accused my uncle, as he vomited both from his mouth and from a tracheotomy hole in his neck, of faking his illness. The next day, my uncle was dead and Maxo was released from detention. It was his fifty-sixth birthday. Once the pain of his father’s death had eased, he joked, “My parents never wanted me to have a happy birthday.”

After unsuccessfully pursuing asylum, Maxo returned to Haiti. He missed his five young children, who were constantly calling to ask when he was coming home. There was also his father’s work to continue—small schools and churches to oversee all over Haiti. The return, though, was brutal. During our telephone calls, he talked about the high price of food in Port-au-Prince. “If it’s hard for me, imagine for the others,” he’d say.

His time in detention in the United States had sensitized him to prison conditions and to the lack of prisoners’ rights in Haiti. He often called asking for money to buy food, which he then took to the national penitentiary.

This generosity, along with the Haitian sense of kindness and community, is perhaps why, immediately after four stories collapsed on Maxo on January 12th, family, friends, and even strangers began to dig for him and his wife and their children. They managed to free his wife and all but one of his children, ten-year-old Nozial, from the rubble two days later. Even when there was little hope, they continued to dig for him and for those who had died along with him: some children who were being tutored after school, the tutors, a few parents who had stopped by to discuss their children’s schoolwork. We will never know for sure how many.

The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said, why not me?

By the time Maxo’s body was uncovered, cell phones were finally working again, bringing a flurry of desperate voices. One cousin had an open gash in her head that was still bleeding. Another had a broken back and had gone to three field hospitals trying to get it X-rayed. Another was sleeping outside her house and was terribly thirsty. One child had been so traumatized that she lost her voice. An in-law had no blood-pressure medicine. Most had not eaten for days. There were friends and family members whose entire towns had been destroyed, and dozens from whom we have had no word at all.

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you,” I said. “If not for the baby—”

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”

“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while. ♦

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent book is the novel “Claire of the Sea Light.”